Rabbit at Rest

By John Updike

In this, the fourth and last Rabbit story, Updike says goodbye to Rabbit. We get to experience the last few months of Rabbit's life until his untimely death in his mid 50s.
The novel starts out with Rabbit and his wife Jan at their condo in Florida. Rabbit and Jan are semi-retired and spending their winters in Deleon, Florida while their son Nelson runs the Toyota dealership back in Brewer, PA. Rabbit and Jan seem pretty contented and comfortable but it soon becomes clear that something is screwy back home. Nelson and his family come down to Florida for a brief visit and Nelson is jumpy and skinny and he admits to his mom that he has been using cocaine.
Rabbit takes his granddaughter out sailing and while out on the ocean he has a mild heart attack. He manages to get the boat back to shore where he then collapses.
After he is placed on medication and they get back to Brewer, Rabbit undergoes angioplasty but he can't seem to shake the bad habits that lead to the problem in the first place, not enough exercise and eating improperly.
On his first night home after the angioplasty, his daughter-in-law, angry at her drug-addicted husband, comes into Rabbit's bedroom and seduces him.
Rabbit's son is forced into rehab after a nasty scene when he accuses his family of stealing his cocaine stash. Nelson has also been stealing money from the dealership, almost $200,000 and Toyota pulls their franchise. This really upsets Rabbit and then Jan finds out about the one night stand with the daughter-in-law, and, rather than face her, Rabbit flees down to their condo in Florida. He feels like the whole family is ganging up on him. Jan wants to sell the condo to help cover Nelson's debts and Rabbit doesn't want to. She also wants to sell their little house that Rabbit loves which really upsets him more, plus losing the dealership. Throw in a foolish attempt to recapture his lost youth with a pick-up game of basketball and it all adds up to a major heart attack, one from which Rabbit will not recover.

Sad to read a book about a man who has finally reached a point in his life where things are pretty good only to see it all taken away within the course of a few months. In this last book Rabbit is less of a stinker than in the first two and it seems as if the deck is stacked against him this time. Feels just a little unfair to Rabbit but maybe not. Rabbit is still a pretty selfish guy but at least in one respect he has improved: in this book there are no fantasies of smashing his wife's head in. Rabbit has settled down, ready to moulder away into comfortable old age, but it is not to be. Technically, Rabbit has heart disease but it seems like that last heart attack was really his own heart breaking from seeing his world fall apart and dealing with it all on his own, having estranged himself from his wife and family. In the end, jerk though he was, I was sorry to see Rabbit go.

I really enjoyed Updike's descriptions of Florida, of Rabbit's last drive south, and of Rabbit's experience with heart disease. It just felt like the real deal, almost as good as being there. Updike really has an amazing eye for descriptive detail, he really captures it. Excellent novel.

New Words

Macoma tellin: a mollusk; in this case its shell. '"Oh," he says, enjoying posing as casually brave, shaping the ash of his cigarette on the edge of a lovely Macoma tellin he uses as an ashtray, "it's mostly talk."

Taborets: A taboret or tabouret refers to two different pieces of furniture, a cabinet or a stool in the shape of a drum. 'Stuffed flowered chairs with broad wooden arms, plush chocolate-brown sofa with needlepointed scatter pillows and yellowing lace antimacassars, varnished little knickknack stands and taborets, a footstool on which an old watermill is depicted, symmetrical lamps whose porcelain bases show English hunting dogs in gilded ovals, an oppressively patterned muddy neo-Colonial wallpaper, and on every flat surface, fringed runners and semi-precious glass and porcelain elves and parrots and framed photographs of babies and graduating sons and small plates and kettles of hammered copper and pewter, object to dust around but never to rearrange.'